DR Journal | SIOS SANless clusters

SIOS Technology Corp. (www.us.sios.com), maker of SAN and #SANLess clustering software products, today announced that leading enterprise companies are turning to its SANLess clustering software, SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition, to provide high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) of critical data on business critical applications in Amazon Web Services cloud environments. Some of these enterprises include Gulliver International, a Tokyo-based pre-owned car company; Epicure Selections, Canada’s leading direct sales company; and Spirent, a global leader in communications test and measurement.

“Business critical applications require high availability protection, regardless of where they are deployed,” said Jerry Melnick, COO, SIOS Technology. “In the cloud, you need to protect applications from downtime just as you do in a physical server environment. However, traditional solutions, such as shared-storage clusters may not be practical or even possible in the cloud. With SIOS SANLess clustering software, enterprises are able to use traditional Windows Server Failover Clustering to provide high availability and disaster recovery protection for SQL Server and other enterprise applications in the cloud without the limitations of shared storage.”

Most cloud providers enable a measure of disaster protection by allowing enterprises to use multiple separate and redundant data centers or computing resources. However, they do not offer shared storage (i.e., a SAN), which is required to support traditional Microsoft Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) for high availability. SANless software can be added to a WSFC to create a high availability cluster without the need for shared storage. With it, companies can quickly and easily run their business critical applications, such as SQL Server, SAP, Siebel Gateway, and others, in a cloud environment without sacrificing high availability protection.

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Easy-to-Manage High Availability Protection for Business Critical SQL Server

SAN MATEO, Calif. – SIOS Technology Corp. (www.us.sios.com), maker of SAN and #SANLess clustering software products, today announced that Cayan™ is using SIOS DataKeeper™ Cluster Edition software to protect its important Windows applications.

Cayan is the leader in the payment solutions industry. The company’s flagship Genius® Customer Engagement Platform® aggregates and integrates every conceivable transaction technology, payment type and customer program – both present and future – into a single platform. Customers include some of the world’s largest online retailers. “Our top priority is ensuring that our customers can complete transactions continuously 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” said Paul Vienneau, chief technology officer, Cayan.

When the company decided to move to a larger, state-of-the-art data center, they looked for an affordable, easy-to-deploy way to provide high availability and disaster protection for the SQL Server database that their Genius platform and other important applications run on. The company considered using a traditional shared storage cluster, but did not want the cost and complexity of purchasing and managing a SAN storage array. As shared storage, a SAN would also introduce the risk of a single point of failure. “We needed a solution that could handle the large volume of transactions we process without slowing application performance,” said Vienneau.

Cayan IT staff decided to use SANLess clusters. They built two-node clusters using standard Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) and adding SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition software as an ingredient. “The SIOS software has very intuitive configuration wizards that enabled us to deploy our platform and applications in the SANLess clusters quickly and easily,” said Vienneau. “Since SIOS DataKeeper is completely integrated with WSFC, our IT staff did not have to change system administration or add complexity.”

Because the SANLess clusters use local storage, there is minimal performance overhead and fast application response times. “We were able to run our applications in the new SANLess cluster environment in our new data center in a full production mode before we put it into full production. We set up a performance lab and tested the replication latency under heavy load. It ran great. The SIOS software met or exceeded our expectations. Implementation and ongoing administration is easy and we have had zero downtime since we implemented our SIOS SANLess clusters,” said Vienneau.

“Results achieved by Cayan are common across SIOS’ customer base,” said Jerry Melnick, COO, SIOS Technology. “SIOS DataKeeper adds replication for disaster protection in SAN-based Windows clusters and enables SANLess clusters in Windows Server Failover Clustering environments where shared storage clusters are impossible or impractical.”

About SIOS Technology Corp.

SIOS Technology Corp. makes SAN and #SANLess software solutions that make clusters easy to use and easy to own.An essential part of any cluster solution, SIOS SAN and #SANLess software provides the flexibility to build Clusters Your Way^™to protect your choice of Windows or Linux environment in any configuration (or combination) of physical, virtual and cloud (public, private, and hybrid) without sacrificing performance or availability. The unique SIOS #SANLess clustering solution allows you to configure clusters with local storage, eliminating both the cost and the single-point-of-failure risk of traditional shared (SAN) storage.

Founded in 1999, SIOS Technology Corp. (www.us.sios.com) is headquartered in San Mateo, California, and has offices throughout the United States, United Kingdom and Japan.